image of a box taken with the thing that was in the box

I’m not what you’d call a “phone guy”. I don’t keep up with trends, it took me for ever to cave and get a Blackberry, I don’t text..etc. the mobile phone for me is a necessary evil, and that’s pretty much where it ends.

So imagine my surprise when Motorola offered me a new Milestone phone to play with. I like gadgets as much as the next guy, so I said sure! I’d never played with an Android-based phone before, might even be fun.

Android is google’s phone operating system, and while I don’t know much about it, when I powered it up, it asked for my google account, and after a few mins, my gmail/contacts/calendar/etc were all set on the phone. Very, very cool. It’s also a fun little machine to browse the web with, something I can’t stand to do on the Blackberry, it’s just too damn small. This screen is nice & sharp, and pretty easy to read even for my not-so-great eyes..

So just as a bedside browser & alarm clock, this thing is pretty cool so far. I’ll play with it for a few weeks, and let you know what I think. Don’t expect a full review with specs and all that, specs do nothing for me. So if you want to discuss specs, I’m sure there are phone forums where people argue this stuff all day long..

I’ll give you my impressions and what I found good & bad at the end of the month..

Some of you already know this, but I’m a big fan of radio. I love the technology, the romance, the history of this medium. I collect old radios, and from time to time I’ll listen to old time radio programs from the “Golden Age” (1930’s-1950’s) of radio.  I picked up a book recently called “the Great American Broadcast” (it’s out of print, try bookcloseouts.com) by Leonard Maltin, better known for his movie reviews..

While I wish I could read “the Great Canadian broadcast”, it was still a fun read for me, and a look back at the days when radio was king of entertainment, advertising, and shaping of public opinion.

In that time, as now, sponsors were king – but it was different in that sponsors more often than not owned/controlled the entire show. The block of time was sold, and the sponsor filled it with content that (hopefully) drew the audience they wanted. Whatever creative forces were at work on the show, the final product had to be approved by the sponsor. While lucrative, this situation left many producers/writers frustrated at the limits imposed by this commercial agreement.

Radio networks couldn’t necessarily sell the entire broadcast day, so they would develop their own content, and try to sell little advertising slots (much as happens on TV/radio today), in hopes that at some point a major sponsor would come through and pay for the entire show. Often, these shows ran without ads – letting the creative team have (relatively) free reign over the content.

A well-known example of creativity allowed by these “sustaining programs” is the famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast from Orson Wells’ Mercury theatre. This program acting out HG Wells’ story about an alien invasion had people literally thinking real aliens were landing in New Jersey. Hard to believe today, but in 1938, it was surprisingly easy for people to buy into simulated reports about an invasion.  It worked precisely because they never had a voice-over guy break in to say “… And now, Pepsodent proudly presents: Tiny green men!”.  At the time though, I’m sure many advertising people were quite happy to have nothing to do with freaking the nation out in the way that this program did. It would have been hard to PR a way out of that one (”We thank you for your complaint, we take your jumping out a window very seriously…”)…

This brings me to the content you create (of course it does)…

I’m trying to draw a parallel between those old radio days and today’s “everyone is a creator” environment. To this day, many bloggers/podcasters/etc dream of the big sponsorship deal that lets them do their thing for money. It’s a great dream, but you need to decide from day one if your content is going to be a sustaining program or sponsored show. Neither is necessarily bad, but most often, they don’t overlap. If someone is paying your way, they get control, if not explicitly then at least implicitly…

Do you want money or freedom? Each has its cost..

Pic: Radio Radio, originally uploaded by Bob Goyetche.

So many people with blogs now, that it’s almost guaranteed that a bad (or perceived bad) customer-service experience becomes a blog post. The whining is overwhelming, and often the blogger will wonder how DARE that company give this blogger a bad experience “I’m SO angry, I’ll blog about this for sure!!”

Really, I’ve no problem with it, but often these same people won’t give a second thought to praising a positive customer experience. I think a more balanced approach goes a long way towards credibility.

Recently, out of nowhere, my beloved Canon DSLR lost its ability to process colours properly. A call to a (very friendly) customer service person later, and my camera was headed for an under-guarantee repair at the national service centre in Toronto.

Along with the invoice and RMA information, I included a hand written note saying “Please process quickly, I’m heading off on a trip soon – thanks in advance for trying!”..

Within 3 days (not counting travel time), my camera was repaired/cleaned/aligned and on its way back to me.

I like to praise even more than I like to bitch, so thanks Canon Canada, for the quick turnaround.

Some would argue that it should always be fast and mutter something about the fact that we shouldn’t be surprised by good customer service, but at the end of the day, this was a good experience, and I wanted you to know about it. If your blog is nothing but a bitch-fest, maybe you could try attempting to project a more balanced view?

Photo: Sensor go boom, originally uploaded by Bob Goyetche.

Usually, a “soft launch” of a website involves few people finding out about it, and working out the kinks as awareness ramps up. It seems a social media soft launch is really about waiting three minutes until everyone finds out! The great people behind Podcamp Toronto soft-launched the 2010 website and registration yesterday, and seeing as it targets a group of people who tend to broadcast everything they do, it didn’t stay quiet for long.

It bums me out to no end that conflicting commitments are keeping me away from my podcamp toronto friends this year. Though it’s not my home city, I do consider it a social media home, and will miss seeing good friends this february..

If you have any thoughts of going, go register now (it’s FREE!).. If you are thinking of not going, what the hell is wrong with you? You won’t find more a more open and passionate event. Go if you need to learn about production, social media, or just to feed off the vibe – just go and say hi to my dear friends while you’re there..

Tell ‘em Bob sent ya

Photo credit :
PodCamp Toronto opens, originally uploaded by griffintech.

At bitnorth ‘09, I told a story about our adventure in pirate radio in the early 90’s….Despite being unlicensed, and by extension not bound by CRTC (Canada’s FCC) rules, we found ourselves emulating commercial radio. We didn’t swear (on purpose anyway), we played station IDs at the top of the hour, we did our best to abide by rules that didn’t apply to us.

Sure, we had fun, but we limited ourselves by abiding by these rules that weren’t ours. Part of that was born of our wish to not attract too much attention and seem just like any other station to someone who happened to be twirling the dial (twirling – that’s how radio listeners surfed, young’uns)..

Looking back though, I do somewhat regret we didn’t take more chances. After all, contrary to what we believed then, we had almost nothing to lose. No family member was going to stop getting food – the worst that could have happened is we would have paid a little fine and lose a CD player or two.. What a great story that would be 20 years later….

So here you are in 2010, and by reading this, I know you’re also online.. What rules are you following? A quick search of posts this week give you plenty of rules to choose from :

• Food Rules
• 10 Golden rules of social media
• Rules for Twitter
• 10 Rules of Good Design
• Good Rules for Blogging
• Rules for a great blog comment

–  ENOUGH!

I’m not picking on these authors, but holy crap it’s as if there are only two groups of people online:

1. Those who make up rules.
2. Those who follow them.

Can I point out that NO ONE in group 2 has much chance at success?

So where does that leave us?… You can try to lead group 2 by being in group 1. or,

You can be in group 3, and refuse to be defined around rules that don’t apply to you.

Whose rules are you following? and why?

Photo:
BOOK CLUB RULES, originally uploaded by Bob Goyetche.

(or “Bob, why are you lying down in the snowy driveway?” )

Why did I take a picture of my tire (or tyre, UK-friends)? It’s part of something called “The Daily Shoot“. A simple way to take more pictures… As with any skill, you (apparently) get better at photography the more you do it, so when I came across this site I immediately jumped in.

The idea is that there is an assignment each day, you take that shot, publish it somewhere and tweet it to @dailyshoot. The site then scans for those tweets, and makes a thumbnail gallery of the pictures taken. No contest, no prizes, no product placements. There are no gear requirements or anything, a camera phone is fine – the idea is to get you out there and shooting.

I’ve added some complexity for myself in that I will try to get as far as I can with this by only using my 50mm lens. I think it may help me think about shot composition some more…

Once again, there’s no money, it’s just a fun way to learn/observe/share this fun hobby. It’s also a fun way to see how people interpret the assignments.

Grab your camera, and join the fun at Daily Shoot!

Something I almost never do, is look at the stats for this blog – after all, it’s not there to pull in thousands of readers, it’s a “home base” kinda blog that links my other projects together… Anyway, I pulled the stats for the my most read posts during the last year :

Some things are interesting to note here.. the “Tetes a claques” post is (By far!) my most read post. In fact, it’s the 4th biggest hit for “tetes a claques” on Google. I almost want to delete this post from 2007, as this isn’t how I want people to find me.. Another option would be to go back and edit that post and load it with adsense links or something… bleah…

To be honest, I’m pretty happy with the way the rest of the list works out – It’s quite varied for topics, and my bio page even makes an appearance in the top ten. I guess that means some people reading my non-Tetes-a-claques material do in fact want to know more about me. This, is cool. After all, that’s what this blog is all about.

I’m happy I’ve resisted the urge and suggestion to go topic-specific on this blog, there’s lots of room to do that elsewhere.  The “Blogging experts” will tell you to have a blog about one topic, to hit the niche well, and often. What many of them won’t tell you though, is how to look human. If you’re into this whole online thing, the last thing you want to do is make your namesake blog about only one thing – there’s more to you than that.

If you feel you must consistently blog about a particular subject, come up with a clever name and start that project.

For your own name though, try to be you.

In my house, we celebrate Christmas.. It’s just the way things are. To us, it’s about family, friends, children, magic, smiles, and enjoying the company of people important to us.

I hope you have important people, and that you are important to someone as well. I’m blessed to have both, and will be enjoying both these situations  during this holiday season.

2009 was a bitch to a lot of people, 2010 will make up for it – I feel it.

Whatever it is you celebrate (or don’t) have a happy (or not) one from my family and I.

Photo:
Our Xmas Tree, originally uploaded by Bob Goyetche.

Not just in a dimly-lit room, I mean COMPLETELY in the dark. No way to see where your food is, or even what it is. It’s quite the experience.

Last Tuesday night, we were part of a group of Montreal bloggers/tweeters invited to a “tweet-up” as part of the launch of Molson’s Rickard’s Dark beer. It was a  fun event, held at the John Molson room at the brewery.  For a guy like me, just being at the brewery is a blast, having done my part over the years to contribute to the revenue stream there..